(Caffeinated) Knitting keeps me (chemically) balanced.

Friday, July 02, 2010

I'm still here...busy as all get out and waiting patiently for the sock pattern I'm to test to reach my inbox. Yarn possibilities have been pulled out and set aside while I wait. And my thoughts are moving back towards socks. My thoughts haven't been so closely tied to knitting in a very, long time (and it feels really good to get myself reacquainted with my old "friend"!)

My mother has this saying about any change in life: she says, “Give it time, it takes two years”. Well, she's right.

Whether it be a birth, a death, a marriage, a divorce, or even a move or retirement…”it takes two years”. Her theory is that it takes the first year for a person to “get used to the idea" of the change and go through all of the “firsts”. Then the second year to start figuring out what the new life is going to "look like" and to start getting used to it. (Heck, why do you think the “terrible twos” wait so long to start!?! It’s nature’s way of giving you time to be prepared for them!) Well, I am coming up on my own two year anniversary; two years since discovering that my marriage wasn't what I thought it was.

It took the first year to get used to the idea (if there actually is any getting used to the idea!) and working through the divorce process. Then the divorce almost a year ago. The sale of the house…the final piece of our lives together…this spring. And now, two years later, I finally see that my life has begun anew. Some changes came easily, others not quite so smoothly. But, as always, each of them has been an adventure accompanied by our band of merry friends and family.

It seems fitting then that my Stitching Witch Travel Bug has been “MIA” for nearly two years. You can read about her initial launch here…but to recap, her initial “flight” took place from New Orleans, then to Oregon, then to South Korea…where she sat nearly dormant for almost two years! Until a few weeks ago, when a German geocacher found her and took her home to Germany to kick start her journey to magical places. Since arriving in Germany two weeks ago, she has been to Koln & Dusseldorf (both cities the girls & I have visited) and is currently in Bayern headed towards…maybe Heidelberg where Celia is visiting her Boyo…maybe Munich where she could visit with Victor or Bockstark. In all, StitchingWitch has currently logged nearly 14,000 miles!!

At the time, I was disappointed that she was “stuck” in Korea. However, it was appropriate. I’d been “stuck” back then going through my own dormant period time without much in the way of forward motion. Not anymore! And it feels good to be revitalized!! Of course, for the time being, my travels will have to be a bit vicarious through the StitchingWitch while we work on the house. However, one of her “goals” is to get to Stonehenge. Some traveler may grab her and get her closer to making that a reality…only time will tell. Quite frankly, if she makes it there, I may have to drop everything and meet up with her!!

Sunday, July 27, 2008

This weekend, the mailman stuffed my mailbox with this box. A Priority Mail shoe box. Who knew these even existed? Not me. (Though I've ordered some for myself now.)

Unlike another recent parcel, this one was from my Secret Pal and was ripped into right away!!! I've been watching on Ravelry and in blogdom as one person after another has posted about their Secret Pal parcels. I've impatiently waited.

And what was inside?

A geocache!!! What a perfect parcel!! My pal has done a bit of research and discovered that even though we've found a number of geocaches (140), we haven't placed any yet. (Currently, there are roughly 625,000 caches worldwide with more being added every day.) So he/she put together a container for us to hide and register as an official geocache.

We'll have to search out a good location to hide this container in the next week or two. Owners typically give them fun names. (Go to Geocaching.com, enter your zip code and look at the names...you don't have to be signed up to look at the names.) Any suggestions? If we have enough of them, another survey may appear in the very near future.

Geocoins have a code so that they can be tracked as they travel the world. (Hmmm, we could have a "Name the Sheep" contest too and release the sheep in the new geocache!) Omigosh....my Pal nailed it with this parcel!!!

Now I'm curious, does my Pal geocache as well...or did he/she read up on it? (My guess is a fellow cacher.) Curious too; is my Pal a member of the Ravelry Geocachers group? There are more than 200 in the group...and I'm not about to snoop to see if I can figure out if my Pal is in there. I like surprises too much!

This was far and away a parcel well worth waiting for!!! Thank you Pal!

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Creatures of habit...that's what we are. Each year since moving here, we have made the migration back to Madison, WI for Rhythm & Booms, the Midwest's largest fireworks display set to music. As usual, we took along our supplies and our shopping lists.

The weather was perfect. Not too hot and not rainy. We left on Friday so that Saturday morning we could visit Farmers' Market.

Thirteen summers we spent our Saturday mornings strolling the capital perimeter shopping for our weekly meals and people watching. It felt good to stroll down memory lane and was especially comforting to find many of the same vendors in the same locations they'd been in eight years ago when we left!

As we did many of the old familiar activities, Panda recounted tales of days gone by. "Hey, I remember going to dance class and getting a big cookie afterwards!" (Part of her weekly routine from ages 4-6.) Unfortunately, Special K, who was 3 when we moved, is a "visitor" when we visit the city she and her sister were born in. For me, Madison holds SO many precious memories of their early childhood.

However, geocaching in a beloved city levels the field and we all discover new places together.

Of course, there were also knit shop stops. There are new additions for the stash AND my library. Stay tuned.

BTW Did you happen to notice how lonely Shaun looks (above) in my windshield? His traveling buddy, Luke, is currently on his worldwide tour. First he was in Tokyo and now he's safely landed in another foreign country...actually, he's visiting someone a little closer to Shaun's original home.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Is there anything better than friends showing up to spend a nice summer weekend!?!

What would the weekend be without a few introductions!?!

Sudden rain storms seemed to surprise them. We've learned to take them in stride. Even Doogie, comfortable enough in his manhood to grab the first rain coat available even if it's pink, wasn't going to let a little rain keep him from grilling dinner!! (He does most of the summer cooking, I do the winter cooking.)

Of course, we introduced them to a little geocaching. In another sudden downpour! Honest, when we left the house the skies were blue with large, puffy white clouds.

One of our other favorite things to do with visitors is to go for a walk out to the lighthouse. The kids attempted to not be blown away! And look, the skies are blue with puffy white clouds merely thirty minutes after the geocache photo. (And yes, there was one more sudden downpour while they were here...that one included a rainbow!)

Dino is home from Iraq and doesn't have to report for work at the Pentagon until July 11th. In the meantime, the three of them are roaming the highways and by-ways of the US (they're on their way to Niagara Falls now) and getting to be a family again. This is one of my favorite photos from our time together...father and son, hand in hand. You can't ask for a better weekend.

Monday, May 05, 2008

There's nothing like it to return calm to a soul that's been disturbed. Disturbed I tell you! No, my knitting has not pushed me over the edge...but my neighbors did.

If you're a regular here, you know it's not in my nature to use the blog to vent. However, grant me this one lapse to share with you my deepest, darkest pet peeve: lawn mowing on Sundays.

That's right...it drives me nuts to hear lawn mowers running on Sundays. Now, before anyone writes and says that it's the only day of the week that they are able to, let me just restate that it's my own personal pet peeve. When I was a kid, Sunday was the "day of rest". It was the day to play with your family, not catch up on the chores. AND especially not fill the air with the obnoxious sound of lawn mowers. Heathens, I tell you.;-)

This Sunday, when the eighth lawnmower's engine revved into gear, I snapped. We grabbed the GPS units and headed into the woods. It was beautiful! There were flowers, lots of flowers. There was mud. WE didn't mind the mud because there were deer tracks in the mud. There was a woodpecker rattling away at a tree to get his dinner. He was the only "noise", besides us, in the woods.

And there were geocaches. Two of them to be exact, in the very same woods. Notice Panda rearranging the "fallen bark" to re-hide one of our finds. That one was the easy one. The other, well, let's just say that some caches are large and some are small...very small...35mm canister small.

In fact, look closely and you will see the cache in the group shot photo. The only hint I'll give is to say that it's a good thing that Doogie is tall.

Ahhhh. So much nature. Peaceful nature. (Then again, it was adjacent to a cemetery.)

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

A few stolen moments on the streetcar allows for a bit of knitting, but for the most part we have been "on the move"! TIP: If you visit New Orleans, ask at your hotel desk about a VisiTour Pass. For $12, your pass will allow you to hop on and off the trolleys and buses as many times as you'd like for three days! We get one whenever we visit.

We've spent the past couple of days doing a bit of geocaching. As many times as I've been to New Orleans, I've never seen it from this vantage point. Nothing quite like being at the "top" of the city! Absolutely beautiful!!!

One of the wonderful aspects of this city is that it would be difficult to run out of things to do. Each time that we've been here, we do a few of our favorite things and then try out a few new things. The aquarium & zoo are spectacular, 40 museums would keep you busy for awhile and, of course, riding the streetcar never gets old! However, Geocaching this time allowed us to look at the city from an entirely different point of view...literally and figuratively!

Something else is that we took a ride to the end of the delta...to Venice...Louisiana, that is. This is the heart of "ground zero" for Hurricane Katrina. The rebuilding is an interesting thing to see. Both the size and the scope hits both ends of the spectrum...but we'll save that for another day.

As for my girls, they have now been to both ends of the Mississippi River. They've walked across through the headwaters and played at the edge of the southern delta...at the bottom of Louisiana.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Miss me? The kids had a break from school and we fled to the big city...Chicago.

In particular, the kids (and the sock) went to visit the Star Wars exhibit. Out of this world!

In the 22 years that Doogie and I've been married he often teases me about my ability to run into someone I know. The story remains the same even in a city of 3 million people. While Special K was busy trying to teach a robot to walk, we managed to run into our former neighbors from ten years ago! Imagine what might happen if I came to your town.

Of course the exhibit wasn't the only thing Chicago had to offer. We played tourists and went to Navy Pier and walked the Magnificent Mile. There was a geocache at Water Tower Place and soon we had a pretty good idea as to why Chicago is known as the Windy City.

Unfortunately, all of the hats, mittens and scarves were tucked away in the laundry room drawer. (We could've used a few items from the drawer.)

Along the way Special K, who lives in her warm woolens at home, HAD to buy a hat. The fact that is was just like Kelsi's from HSM2 may have had something to do with it too. (She loves that movie and soundtrack!)

Later, when we met up with Tom and Franklin for a late lunch, I'll admit to being slightly embarrassed when Franklin asked if I'd knit Special K's hat. How I wanted to say, "Why yes...that is one of my projects." But, instead, I admitted to being the knitter who purchased acrylic knitwear for her child. These things happen when you roadtrip.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

It's hot out! What better way to cool down than to think about Christmas! Christmas Around the World Swap could help you think about something other than hot weather (assuming you live where it's HOT!).

There haven't been enough hours to play with Color Inspiration yet, but love how it looks. If you've used it, please feel me in.

For those of you who've wondered about our geocaching adventures, this story does a good job of showing what it's like. (Well, actually in order to "see", you should watch the video.) We really enjoy it...especially when it takes us near an old fashioned ice cream parlor like this one did on our recent trip to MI! (After all, hiking and searching can work up an appetite.)

Brenda's been talking about scouting and camp this summer in her podcast. While listening I find myself thinking about all kinds of childhood activities...including paper chains. The ones in this link are a bit more "upscale" than the ones we made as kids; ours were mostly made out of chewing gum wrappers. I never did manage to learn how to attach the two ends to make a necklace out of my summertime chain. Hmmmm, it's never too late.

Dragonflies were the "pretty" nature we saw. I will spare you the two super-sized spiders, the army tent worms by the billions, and the 5 ticks we picked off of four of us!

You never know what you'll find in the woods...how about a giant (plastic wrapped) snake with bright, pink umbrella!?!

The Shopping

Fairy Godmother spent 45 minutes sorting through her knitting to pack along for the weekend only to leave her knitting bag at home. I hate that when that happens!!! Thankfully, it also means a "required" trip to the knitting store for supplies.

Knit Camp happens to have a number of nice shoppes in the area. This time we checked out Unraveled. They had a really nice selection. Fairy Godmother decided that she wanted to learn how to knit socks...so we got sock yarn. I managed to leave with only ONE new skein of yarn (Sockotta 6673). I also picked up a copy of Meilenweit Sock Pattern Book #3...it's already on loan to Fairy Godmother!! Cool.

The Lessons

As this was "knit camp", the "Gangsta Knitting School" was also in session. As previously mentioned, this time the subject was SOCKS. (What else!?!) Fairy Godmother cast on her first pair of top-down standard socks. 3rd Daughter dove in with toe-up socks on two circs! The timing for Summer 2007 Interweave Knits lessons in toe-up socks couldn't have been more timely! By the time we were ready to leave, 3D had completed the foot and heel of Ann Budd's On Your Toes socks !! She is really a quick study!

The Geocaching

Of course, no trip would be complete for the Krafty1 Gang without a cache or two. 3D's sister was unable to join us last fall, so she came along this time to learn the ins and outs of geocaching. We let her man the GPS unit to find two of the caches we found last fall. PLUS, we did two new ones...our 89th and 90th finds!

All in all, it was a great weekend! The company of good friends, good food, and good times...is there any better way to spend a weekend!?! Now it's back to work and school. The girls have another week+ to go. The dog is home from the kennel (...the hardest part of any get-away weekend is kennel arrangements!). The next big getaway will be in July. Then there will be Stitches in August. I can't help but wonder though, when will the next "Up North Knit Camp" be? Knitting and nature...gotta love it!

Monday, May 28, 2007

As quite often happens, when I have one thing in mind, another thing presents itself. In this case, Roza's socks by Grumperina came along and suddenly I started thinking of Madame Rosmerta. She doesn't seem to do things in the normal fashion and thus an idea was born. Sure, it looks great tonight as it awaits its mate. But, if you've learned anything about me in the past months, I enjoy new challenges.

Thus Madame Rosmerta's socks are based on Roza's, but are knit toe-up. Rewriting the pattern required a bit of magic (and a frog or two).

At one point the heel seemed a bit short. Not a problem...just pull out the needles magic wands and place them where they can work their magic...

Bring in the frog chorus...and then go to bed. Once you've frogged, it's best to set the knitting aside so that it can think about what it's bad behavior. I'm happy with the results and am anxious to get the second sock cast on.

But, this was a holiday weekend....not all about knitting. (Don't gasp too loudly!) There was a lot of fun to be had on Saturday while geocaching our way to my brother's house. We stayed with caches that would be "level" for my young one with the "broken wing". My Dad dubbed her "Special K" and it seems to be a nickname that is going to stick around awhile. (Some of you did NOT like the switch to Casey...too bad if you don't like the Special K moniker...Grandpa likes it and that's what counts!!)